[Grade Inflation Series | Toogood Reports News & Commentary | Free Republic | Front Page Mag ]
America's Debt to Blacks
Already Paid in Full
[Thursday, August 16, 2001] A Different Drummer While millions of American blacks demand that American (read: predominantly white) taxpayers pay slavery reparations of up to one million dollars to each and every "black" resident of the United States, in fact, American taxpayers -- and consumers -- have already paid trillions of dollars in reparations (read: racial extortion). And the tab is rising daily. In fact, assessing the cost of reparations already paid is such a huge task, that Jared Taylor, the author of Paved with Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America, has formed a research team to determine it. On July 6, Taylor wrote me, that "the New Century Foundation, of which I am president, has just commissioned a study to find out what blacks cost the country every year. We expect the study be completed in several months..." Blacks have taken the reparations which have been paid to them in stride as their just due, while refusing to admit that they were reparations. They have seen each such payment as an entitlement, and as a stepping stone to their next, more grandiose demand. In many cases, blacks and their white elite supporters have managed to hush up even the existence of reparations payments, demonizing anyone willing to speak of the payments as reparations or racial extortion as an unregenerate "racist." And yet, like people living under the rule of mobsters, most white and Asian Americans are increasingly trapped in a web of reparations that limits the jobs they may compete for, and the wages they may earn, and which inflates their taxes, and increasingly, the prices they pay for goods and services. Reparations payments have taken the form of explicitly and implicitly race-based government programs; the racist abuse of existing government programs; affirmative action schemes that violate the U.S. Constitution and the 1964 Civil Rights Law, whereby millions of unqualified blacks have been variously hired to jobs, accepted to institutions of higher learning, or given business contracts instead of qualified white or Asian candidates; the maintenance, at taxpayer expense, of illegal, black institutions; cases of politicians paying off black criminals; shakedowns of white-owned corporations, often with the aid of government agencies and federal judges; illegal, private-sector affirmative action; and most controversially, black-on-white CRIME. For an example of an explicitly race-based (read: racist) institution, consider that almost forty years after the enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which barred racially exclusive organizations, some 120 historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) still exist, approximately half of which are financed virtually entirely by taxpayers. This group includes many schools built AFTER 1964, such as the City University of New York's York and Medgar Evers colleges, respectively, and the University of the District of Columbia. Howard University, the nation's most respected private black university, has alone received billions of dollars in illegal, explicitly race-based funding from the federal government. (Consider too, that many race-based, black charities have tax-exempt status. As Jared Taylor has pointed out in Paved with Good Intentions, it is highly unlikely that race-based white charities would get tax-exemptions.) The federally-funded Community Action Programs (CAPs) constituted another explicitly race-based program. During the 1960s and 1970s, the CAPs were billion-dollar patronage mills for racist, middle-class blacks who encouraged black youth who already had been in trouble with the law, to engage in a bloody race war -- all at taxpayers' expense. Countless other explicitly race-based programs polluted the 1960s and 1970s skyline like so many smoke stacks: Manpower, the Job Corps, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, food stamps, etc. As far back as 1984, in Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980, Charles Murray wrote that government welfare expenditures in the explicitly racial, War Against Poverty amounted to "over $100 billion (in 1980 dollars) each year since the late-1960s; over $200 billion annually since the mid-1970s." To take an example of a supposedly race-neutral agency, Head Start's price tag is now $6.2 billion per year. Head Start may not officially be racist -- some white, and many Hispanic children may participate in it -- but it was founded with a clear racial mandate to serve black children, and the implicit justification, wherein any problems suffered by black children are the historical responsibility of whites. Welfare was, at its founding during the Roosevelt Administration, a truly race-neutral program. However, in America's cities during the 1960s through the early 1970s, the communist leaders of the National Welfare Rights Organization, turned welfare into a black reparations program. NWRO activists reached out to black unwed mothers, convincing them to quit their jobs, and go on the dole. At the same time, the activists waged an unrelenting, and ultimately successful campaign against welfare regulations which forbade able-bodied women from quitting their jobs and receiving welfare. The New York campaign was waged from within. As progressive historian Fred Siegel has chronicled, NWRO leader Mitchell "Come and Get It" Ginsberg served from 1966-73 as liberal Republican New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay's welfare commissioner. During that prosperous period of low unemployment, "Come and Get It" Ginsberg more than doubled the welfare rolls, from 538,000 to 1,165,000. The explosion of black, formerly working welfare mothers cost the city over $2 billion per year -- in 1973 dollars. The fabrication, by black litigants, of non-existent discrimination claims, and the help of government agencies, such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, in extorting employers to pay off such litigants, are a part of everyday life in America. In 1999, the federal government assisted hoaxers in soaking taxpayers for over $600 million. In the frivolous case of Pigford vs. Glickman, black plaintiffs charged that a federal farm loan program had discriminated against black farmers. Officials in the Clinton Department of Agriculture led by agriculture secretary Dan Glickman, agreed to a consent decree, whereby the U.S.D.A. would pay black plaintiffs $50,000 each. The plaintiffs had failed to provide any evidence of discrimination, or to show that they had even applied for the loan program in question, and most had no connection to agriculture. No matter. The Clinton U.S.D.A. insisted on trolling for black plaintiffs (and black votes); over 25,000 plaintiffs have filed claims. As journalist Reed Irvine pointed out in NewsMax.com, the total of 25,000 black plaintiffs far exceeds the number of black farmers in America. So far, 12,000 black plaintiffs have been paid $600 million. The U.S. Department of Education is just one of many federal agencies which seem to exist as little more than a front for seemingly unlimited, illegal, racial reparations transfers from whites and other non-blacks to blacks. The annual payments include (all figures are for fiscal year 2000) "Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs/Gear Up" ($200 million), "Reading Excellence Program" ($260 million), "Aid for Institutional Development, Titles III and V" ($300 million), and "TRIO Programs" ($645 million). Howard University alone received $219 million from DOE, notwithstanding the fact that Howard is a segregated, private institution, and arguably the most racist, anti-Semitic university in America. But the undisputed king of DOE reparations transfer programs was "Title I Grants for Schools Serving At-Risk Children," which received a cool $8 billion. Private businessmen have also learned to love reparations. In 1994, Denny's restaurants paid out $46 million to black litigants in a case that began when black Secret Service agents claimed they had not been seated quickly enough by employees in a Denny's. In 1996, Texaco Oil paid out $176 million to, and promoted black employees who put forth baseless claims of racial discrimination, based on the race-baiting of Jesse Jackson alone. And in 2000, Jesse Jackson repeated his Texaco Trick, in gaining a $192.5 million payoff from Coca-Cola and a large degree of control over the company, based again on unsupported claims of racial discrimination. But Jackson hit the jackpot last month, when he used the pretext of charging that an innocuous ad for Toyota automobiles was "racist," as an excuse to extort $7.8 billion out of Toyota Motor Corp. In all of the above cases, the tab will be paid by predominantly white, American consumers, and the white workers who will be fired to cut costs. Were a white man to engineer such extortion schemes, he would doubtless be prosecuted by state authorities for extortion, and by federal prosecutors pursuant to RICO laws. To see reparations in action in the business world, one need merely stroll around the main shopping district of any old, industrial city. Walking New York's "Ladies' Shopping Mile," for instance, on Manhattan's Sixth Avenue from West 14th to 34th Street, one enters one store after another -- Barnes & Noble, Staples, Toys'R'Us, etc. -- in which as many as ninety percent of the shoppers are white, but -- excepting the occasional white, female supervisor -- virtually none of the staffers are. And many of these staffers ignore, and even hide out from the customers who are paying their salaries. In New York, many city agency staffs are likewise virtually white-free. Meanwhile, the state Transit Authority (TA), which runs the city's subways, has removed the photographs of station managers, and stopped distributing lists of their names and stations, because their ranks have been cleansed of white males. Many New York public schools became part of the reparations transfer network as far back as the 1960s. Black-on-white crime is the most controversial aspect of reparations. While insisting that black males nationwide are unfairly stereotyped as predators and "racially profiled," a relentless media campaign has demonized critics of black crime. Many leading Marxists, such as Queens College political scientist Andrew Hacker (author of Two Nations), while insisting that black boys and men are the eternal victims of white racism, consider every black-on-white robbery an act of racial revenge, and an evening of accounts. At the same time, Hacker & Co. call on the same "racist," criminal justice authorities to turn a blind eye to black criminals. And that is just what the authorities are doing. In the ultimate "reparations" scheme, from New York to Cincinnati to Seattle, many black felons rob, rape, maim and murder with impunity. As a black is 18 times more likely to murder, and 50 times more likely to rob a white than a white is likely to do the same to a black, black crime has cost whites untold billions in lost money, property, wages, and in health care and funeral costs. How much have blacks been paid? The possibilities boggle the mind. I'm guessing it's been five to ten trillion dollars, or approximately $150,000 to approximately $300,000 per black resident of the United States. Any way you cut it, it's a lot -- more than enough. Payment has been rendered in full. RECENT COLUMNS: 08/08/01: Gloria Steinem, Grave Robber 08/04/01: Dan Rather, Racist? 07/31/01: Dan Rather on the Public's Right NOT to Know 07/27/01: The Great Grade Inflation Non-Debate, Part VIII: Deafening Silence 07/22/01: The Crimes and Misdemeanors of Gary Condit 07/18/01: New York City Techurs spel Trubble 07/13/01: The Great Grade Inflation Non-Debate, Part VII: To be of Use 07/02/01: The Great Grade Inflation Non-Debate, Part VI: The Garden State 06/27/01: The Great Grade Inflation Non-Debate, Part V: Smoking Guns 06/07/01: In "Pope" John Paul & the ACLU We Trust 06/04/01: The Great Grade Inflation Non-Debate, Part IV: Fighting City Hall 05/30/01: The Great Grade Inflation Non-Debate, Part III: Postmodern Grade Inflation: Plagiarism 05/22/01: The Great Grade Inflation Non-Debate, Part II: Crime Scenes 05/11/01: The Great Grade Inflation Non-Debate, Part I: Reality Testing 04/30/01: Reflections Of A Child-Care Provider 04/23/01: Cincinnati: Recipe For A Riot 04/18/01: Cincinnati Burning 04/09/01: The Horowitz Maneuver Part III: The Fifth Column 04/04/01: The Horowitz Maneuver Part II: The New Free Speech Movement 03/29/01: The Horowitz Maneuver Part I: The Anti-Reparations Ad 03/22/01: Bullies: An Rx for Safe Schools 03/16/01: See No Evil: Seattle and Berkeley 03/07/01: The Race Hoax Handbook: Twelve Steps To Bigger, Better, Race Hoaxes 02/23/01: The Longest Month, Part V: Suing Whitey" 02/15/01: The Longest Month, Part IV: "Keep Hoax Alive!" (Florida Times Fifty) 02/02/01: The Longest Month Part III: The Red and the Black 01/29/01: The Longest Month Part II: The Divine Martin Luther King, Jr. 01/22/01: The Longest Month Part Part I: Martin Luther King's Burden
A Different Drummer is the New York-based web-samizdat of Nicholas Stix. An award-winning journalist, Stix provides news and commentary on the realities of race, education, and urban life that are censored by the mainstream media and education elites. His work has appeared in The (New York) Daily News; New York Post; Washington Times; Newsday; The American Enterprise; Weekly Standard; Insight; Chronicles; Ideas on Liberty; Middle American News; Academic Questions; CampusReports; and countless other publications. Read Stix' weekly column in Toogood Reports. E-Mail him your comments and feedback at adddda@earthlink.net
August 16, 2001
Copyright 2001 by Nicholas Stix. All rights reserved. |
|